We Are What Goes Bump in the Night

What limits us in fighting the darkness?

You are being called in because the previous I-cell members are incapacitated and we need someone in the area to respond to the loss of one of our own, and to cover up any unusual aspects that may come to light in this case.
Your cover will be that you are investigating the murder of Colonel Walter Pondsmith on 15 August, 2015. Col. Pondsmith is retired from the Army, but served his country with distinction. He was also a member of Delta Green. He retired from active ops in 2011, but has acted as a friendly face and occasional intelligence source since then. We fear that his murder was not random, but possible revenge for a past operation.

Witnesses in Pondsmith’s neighborhood reported seeing three suspects; Cam Bradley, Jimmy Jack Hurley, and a third unidentified man parked outside of Pondsmith’s residence in a blue Ford F-150 truck on the evening of 13 August, 2015.

Surveillance footage taken from a convenience store near Horseshoe Lake Park on the evening of 15 August, 2015 positively identified a blue Ford F-150 truck registered to Bradley entering the park. The camera showed two men in the cab of the truck, an additional man in the bed, and a large object covered with a tarp or blanket also in the bed.

Early yesterday morning, the 16th, a jogger discovered Col. Pondsmith’s burned body suspended from a make shift cross on the North side of the Lark. The official story we are giving out is that this is a hate crime by a group calling itself Odin’s White Berserkers, and both Hurley and Bradley are members of the group. We do not know how the third man is involved.

In addition to Col. Pondsmith’s past the initial reports from the Medical Examiner’s office stated that there were unusual properties to the murder, specifically that there were no signs of any type of fuel or accelerant used to burn Col. Pondsmith. I’ve ordered a stop on the autopsy until your people can take over.

In addition to this briefing you will also have access to a Green Box located in South St. Louis. This was I-cell’s primary Green Box and it’s exact contents are currently unknown, but it may have items that could come in handy. Additionally if you find any pieces of evidence or items that may be difficult to explain I recommend storing them in the Green Box.

If it were up to the old guard of Delta Green no one would know anything about who we are and where we came from. That doesn’t jibe with me. And since we don’t officially exist they can’t officially court martial my ass for telling you this.

See Delta got its start back in the 20’s when an investigation by the Treasury Department turned up something odd going on in the coastal town of Innsmouth, Mass. There was some sort of infestation among the locals, and reports indicated a local cult that worshipped some sort of sea monster had taken over the town. So Treasury called in the Navy and Coast Guard to help them get to the bottom of the strangeness. All of the official reports have been classified at the highest level but a few remaining eyewitness accounts say that the Navy bombed a reef offshore for about four hours. They also say that the Navy’s P Division, the part of the Navy set up to investigate Paranormal, Parapsychology, and Psychic phenonmena (thus P Division) recovered some knick-knacks that didn’t look like anything ever made by humans.

These artifacts were interesting enough that the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) decided to hand them over to the head spooks at the time, the Black Chamber. The Black Chamber had their crypto guys go to work on the writing on these things, but whole loads of them went bonkers studying it. By the time they finished we were smack in the middle of the Great Depression and no one wanted to hear about some doomsday cult. Plus the Black Chamber got caught in a diplomatic scandal spying on the Japanese and got itself disbanded.

But ONI, especially the guys that had been on that raid, hadn’t forgotten. So they scooped up all of the stuff the Black Chamber had been working on, as well as some of their smart guys, and kept working on this and hunting down leads on other similar odd occurrences. Up until 1942 ONI and P Division kept gathering information on this cult, as well as others out there. It turned out there were a lot of people out there doing strange things and getting strange results.

All of this changed when the US entered WWII. At the start of the war Roosevelt had a guy named Col. Donovan create a new secret intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. One of the first things OSS did was scoop up P Division and some of the ONI guys to start working on why the Nazi’s were so interested in the occult.

What they discovered was that the Nazi SS had a secret department named Karotechia that was trying to figure out how to weaponized strange and occult occurrences. The OSS files on these activities were given a new classification, DELTAGREENEYESONLY. Those who were allowed to work on the investigation into Nazi occult science were granted this security clearance and learned about the strange experiments being conducted by the Third Reich.

When the Nazi’s were defeated most of the Karotechia officers went missing. Some were likely taken in by the US as part of Operation PAPERCLIP, and some were likely snatched up by the Soviets. But even more just disappeared. Documents captured in Berlin in 1945 showed a Karotechia plan to use occult resources to fight a rear guard action, and detailed attempts to summon beings not native to this world. Delta Green had been privy to one prior attempted summoning that had left Naudabaum Castle a smoking crater and which had devastated the surrounding mountain to a radius of four kilometers.

During the Summer and Fall of 1945 Delta Green agents hunted down and eliminated dozens of Nazi occultists before they could bring their mad plans into motion. All mention of this operation, and of those that sacrificed to keep untold millions alive, was erased from the record. No one outside of the Joint Chiefs and Delta Green knew of what had been done.

On October 1, 1945 President Truman disbanded the OSS, and with it Delta Green. The OSS would reform as the CIA, but Delta Green would not be reborn until June 24, 1947 when an unidentified aircraft crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. Several Delta Green officers lobbied the President to reinstate the project. Truman acquiesced, but he also created an agency called Operation Majestic Twelve (MJ-12) to investigate the Roswell Incident. Delta Green was to investigate reports of extra-terrestrial activity abroad, but was forbidden from operating in the US which would be the domain of MJ-12.

Almost immediately Delta Green started bending the rules of our writ. While we had been forbidden from investigating extraterrestrial activity in the US, the President had said nothing about investigating other sorts of strange phenomena. And while agents did make some token efforts at investigating flying saucers around the world we mostly used it as a shield to launch Operation SOUTHERNHOSPITALITY, an attempt to locate and eliminate members of the Karotechia that had fled to South America. Additionally in 1952 Operation SICSEMPERTYRANIS sent several covert teams into Siberia to cripple USSR paranormal research.

Most of the 50’s and 60’s saw a slog of minor victories as well as some setbacks. A shockingly high number of agents were discharged from Delta Green for mental issues, and suicide rates among former agents topped 30% by 1967. Despite this Delta Green was revitalized by the Vietnam War and the discovery that some of the hill tribes in N. Cambodia and Vietnam are worshipping versions of the occult beings found in Karotechia notes, and the even earlier raid on Innsmouth. Unfortunately the CIA opts to employ some of these cultists putting them in conflict with Delta Green.

In November of 1969 a Marine Colonel in Delta Green ordered a full battalion under his command across the border into Cambodia on an unauthorized mission. Over 300 causalities resulted and the survivors murdered the Colonel and burned his quarters upon their return. We still do not know why he ordered the men into the jungle, or what they found. The survivors were debriefed by the CIA and MJ-12.

As a result Delta Green was disbanded. Most of the active members were discharged or encouraged to retire from their respective agencies or military branches. And all pertinent Delta Green materials were turned over to other government agencies, or destroyed.

This is the beginnings of our modern group. We went underground, using connections to recruit new members who would aid us in our mission to battle the uncanny and strange. Since 1970 we have not been able to call in the full sanction of the US government, but we have learned how to cooperate and collaborate in a way that has made us, in some ways, more powerful.

Throughout the 70’s and 80’s clandestine Delta Green agents picked off cults and negated threats without anyone knowing most of the time. When we were caught it was easy to provide a story that people wanted to hear. Certainly no one else in the government seemed to care. In fact even MJ-12 had gone mysteriously silent.

In February of 1994 we found out why. Major General Reginald Fairfield, a highly decorated former member of Delta Green, was assassinated by an MJ-12 wetworks team in his home in Wyoming. Before he died he emailed all of his files, both from the pre-1970 operational days, as well as the research he had conducted after Delta Green was disbanded. Fairfield had discovered that MJ-12, tasked with studying the potential threat from aliens, had begun working with some form of non-human visitors. Fairfield believed that they had been thoroughly corrupted. Subsequent attempts to confirm this have been inconclusive, but in the wake of Fairfield’s death MJ-12 agents have become much more interested in hunting down and eliminating Delta Green agents.

The biggest step in this direction occurred after September 11, 2001. Using the reorganization of intelligence and law enforcement agencies that occurred in the wake of the terrorist attacks, MJ-12 placed many of their own people at the head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These appointees have used the pretense of routine security checks to uncover and expose a number of Delta Green agents.

At the same time MJ-12 has shown no interest in investigating other occult or odd phenomena, their response seems to be purely driven by Fairfield and others’ investigations into their dealings with whatever landed at Roswell. This puts us in a tricky place as we are losing the war against MJ-12, and as we lose agents more cults and more unexplained occurrences go uncheck and unstopped.

received: from anon.ywy.ub by anon.com with SMTP ID-AA –
[5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for distrib@anonx.com]; 22 April 2015 05:46:21 -0800
Message-ID: <19987446>
Reply-to: hector <hector@anonx.com>
Sender: hector <hector@anonx.com>
From: hector <hector@anonx.com>
Subject: Notification of Activation
To: i-cell <undisclosed>
If you’re reading this it’s because something horrible has happened and you are needed. In this specific case the ‘something horrible’ is the disappearance of a top-secret multi-agency task force code named ‘i-cell’. You have been chosen to become the new i-cell. You may decline, if you do nothing will happen and no one will know about this offer, if you keep your mouth shut. If you decline and decide to blab about this to your CO or just around the chow hall you’ll be lucky if you end up with a Section 8, more likely case is that you get a one-way ticket to an ally with less stringent policies on detainees and the Geneva Conventions.
But you are being asked to join because you’ve seen some shit. You know what I mean, and at least one other person does as well. You’ve shown that when you see something that doesn’t quite fit the way you’ve been told the world works you didn’t shoot your mouth off, you didn’t lose it in a way that made you unfit for duty, but you also didn’t pretend it never existed. You were careful, and you asked the right questions in the right way and got some answers that started you on a path. This is where that path leads, an invitation to join i-cell.
Right about here is where I’m supposed to get into the mission brief and give you the particulars of who, what, and where. But that’s the way the old guard did it, treating new members like mushrooms; alone in the dark and fed an endless supply of shit. That won’t cut it in the post-9/11 world anymore. What you are being offered is membership in an organization called Delta Green. You’ve never heard of us? Good, that’s as it should be.
I’ve attached another file to this message that gives you an ever so brief run down of who Delta Green is and what they’ve done so you can get a better idea of the sort of job you’re being asked to do. But don’t be under illusions, what you are being asked to do is illegal. We are not sanctioned by any official and haven’t been since the early 70’s. If you are caught you will be disavowed, if your colleague, friend, partner, or other intimate relation is part of DG and gets caught, then they are dead to you. What you are being asked to do is bigger than any one agent, even any fifty agents. We do what we do not because we’ve been asked, but because if we don’t then innocent people suffer. The United States suffers. And if you’re the sort that doesn’t care about other people or this country, then we’ve got you pegged wrong. But I say you are, and someone else down the line did as well. That’s why you’ve been asked to risk it all for little to nothing.
Delta Green will not get you promoted, in fact possibly the opposite if you don’t cover your tracks.
Delta Green will not make you rich, there is no paycheck for doing this.
Delta Green will not get you medals or honors. If you do your job correctly no one will ever know.
Now that that is out of the way let me tell you what Delta Green wants from its new recruits:
- Your top priority is to protect innocent people from the kinds of threats regular law enforcement and military just aren’t equipped to handle. You’ll know ‘em when you see ‘em.
- Secondary to that you are to maintain the security of the United States from said threats. This can, and may very well include acting against agents of our own government who are too blinded by short-sighted gain to see the long term consequences of their actions.
- Tertiary responsibilities are to gather any and all intelligence surrounding said threats. If this is not possible then any intel is to be destroyed so as to deny it to the enemy.
The other cells of Delta Green will do what they can to cover for you, and you may be asked to do the same for another cell someday as well. But you should always try to do what you can to create plausible explanations for your actions. Some of the things you will likely see will get you sent to a psych ward if you were to tell outsiders about them, so make your stories good, and make them believable.
That is all. Your mission briefing is attached. If you need any outside support besides that given to you then you will contact me. At this point in time, as far as you know, I am the only other member of Delta Green left alive out there.
Welcome,
Hector (h-cell)